Fantastic Fantasy

     For some reason I've been venturing a bit into flights of fancy, gazing over a few recommended graphic "novels," which in today's world are more like elaborate comic books, novels that try to capture alternate worlds or at least try to blur the lines of our world vs. a world right below or beside us (think Harry Potter aimed at an adult audience).  Besides Neverwhere (mentioned in the last post), there's been Edena by Moebius, Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too, Hyperbole and a Half, Persepolis, and even God (okay, I threw that one in to see if you were paying attention although to read the NY Times review, one might feel that the book fits in easily with the other books). Both ventures of reading "comics" and fantasy, much less fiction in general, are out of character for me yet it has exposed me to another range of creativity, something even engineers have to delve into when dealing with the unknown...use your noggin' man, as a crusty old factory worker would once tell you.  And then Percy landed.  

    Without dwelling too long on the recent Perseverance landing on Mars by NASA, what intrigued me more about the long journey to a distant planet was the viewpoint of the engineers.  They had to plan for radio and thus a controlled "silence" lasting an agonizing 7 minutes as the craft entered the Martian atmosphere, a period of time when 8 months of travel and years of planning (within a $2.4 billion budget) would come down to those minutes of the craft operating and guiding itself without any human contact or correction.  The final task of the craft would be to guide itself, "see," deploy and jettison all that was or was not necessary, then lower the Rover with long cables and detach them in synch at precisely the same time...and after all of that, the actual mission would begin (the video showing the procedure is well worth the three & a half minutes of your time).  How do such minds work, to make the mechanical and the fantastical work in an almost imaginary place, somewhere humans have never been?  To start, they would have to "know" the gravitational pull, the amount of dust that would be kicked up, and the place where the most minerals or possible remnants of early life might reside?  As Walt Disney used to so fondly say about his own engineering group, they would be appropriately called Imagineers.

     Another video that emerged was that of the modern printing press, the paper gliding through as seamlessly as the days of black & white movies with newspapers coming "hot off the press" but with one difference; in today's world, the rollers never touch the paper (wait, what???).  Watching that production of a single issue of The Atlantic, I was as befuddled as trying to comprehend the mechanics of today's currency counters that can zip through a wad of random bills, give you a total, and do so with mixed denominations, bills flipped at all angles, and verifying and spitting out bills that are counterfeit, all at the blazing speed depicted in those movies where the drug cartel is doing nothing but shoving 20s and 100s into those "counters".  How does it all work?  Even when it is explained it baffles me.  But for that matter, who would wonder if the everyday light we see could be broken down and turned into everything from lasers to Lidar, and used to guide our vehicles, and even turned into "wireless" electricity?  Light?  Really??

The color portion is all that our eyes can "see" in the light spectrum.

     So asked an issue of The Economist in noting that Einstein had to basically battle his way through a Nobel Prize judge who didn't really "buy" Einstein's theory of relativity and for three years turned down any of the many nominations for Einstein; it was only when Einstein's colleagues did an end around and nominated him for his theory that light produced electric currents in packets -- the shorter the packet, the more energy it contained; only then did the judge grudgingly allow the Nobel Prize to be awarded to Einstein.  Nearly 50 years earlier, James Clark Maxwell stated that stationary charged objects created electric fields, while those moving created magnetic fields (25 years later, Heinrich Hertz would show this was true when he created radio waves).  Don't ask me to even attempt to explain any of this but here's what the article added: Scientists have since detected and/or made use of electromagnetic waves at wavelengths which range from many times the diameter of Earth to a millionth the diameter of an atomic nucleus.  The wavelengths of visible light --380 nanometres (billionths of a metre) at the blue end of the spectrum, 700 nm at the red end-- are special only because they are the ones to which human eyes are sensitive.  One peek at the graph on the right will help you "visualize" just how little we actually see and how the rest had to be left to our imagination to prove.  Ground-penetrating radar is just as difficult to comprehend (Quartz does a nice summary) although the accurate term there is light detecting ranging.  Such "light" viewing allows us to see what's hidden beneath a canopy of trees or buried deep within the soils of the earth

     Who would think that life would be found a half mile below the ice...on Earth?  Or that our oceans may be facing the loss of one of the crucial building blocks of life (thiamine)?  Or that scientists are now finding that they may be able to "communicate" with subjects' dreams?  At one point these would all seem to be the stuff of fantasy; but not for writers and artists such as Jean Moebius Gerard whose book has a character saying that she will "replenish" the subject's dream memory bank.  Said the illustrator author in one part of his book about a human-like species that occupies one planet: To me, the long-nosed inhabitants of the Nest symbolize people cut off from their environment, both physically and spiritually.  The deliberate formality with which they speak and their masks are like impenetrable shells behind which they hide.  It is like certain types of neuroses that we develop during childhood, where false layers of personality are created to cover all systems of communication with the outside world.*

The "lava" of light at Yosemite's Horsetail Falls.  Photo for Smithsonian by Evelyn Quek

    And then came the memoir by Katherine May, Wintering.  Subtitled THE POWER OF REST AND RETREAT IN DIFFICULT TIMES, Wintering tells of the author's urge to escape, not only from her and her husband's health issues, but also from all else that is seemingly overwhelming her.  So when she grows ill enough to slow down, she discovers more than a few insights: I now have hours and hours of open time to wonder about all these things, and my brain is too foggy to concentrate on much else.  I've cooked a great deal since I've been ill.  It's a nice small parcel of activity, just enough for me to manage at the moment,  It's not as though cooking is new to me; I have always been a cook.  But in that last few years, cooking has been pushed out of my life, along with its accompanying pleasure of shopping around for ingredients.  Life has been busy, and the in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of my identity have been squeezed out.  I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way.  What can you do when you're already doing everything?  The problem with "everything" is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away...The preceding years are not a blank exactly, but they're certainly a blur, and one that's strangely devoid of meaning, except for a clawing sense of survival...I feel as though I've been falling down an impossibly long elevator shaft and have just landed at the bottom with a bump.  It's spacious and echoing in here, and I'm still not quite sure how to get out.  I'm trying to find my way back to something I recognize.

     God, despite the review, summed up a flurry of our questionings throughout history, reminding us that our imaginative changing of earlier beliefs into a "god" that separates good from evil is less than 5000 years old, and that our belief in an afterlife with that god is even more recent.  Prior to that, our religious beliefs were quite different, some early and rather elaborately carved statues that predate Stonehenge and the Pyramids by over 6000 years appear faceless and are hundreds of miles away from any sort of village or "city."  But what was most striking to me in the author's observations was the discovery by archeologists who have exhumed or discovered hard-to-access caves that have depictions of animals or of hands...the majority of the prints they see are from females, leading the scientists to think that perhaps the early female members of the tribes or groups were actually far more important than the men, not only in the survival of the group as a whole but also in the advancement of the population.

     It may be time to open up to what else may be out there, outside of our common beliefs.  The Economist also mentioned a recently released study in Astronomical Journal which suggested: ...that about half of the sun-like stars in the Milky Way are circled by at least one rocky planet capable of sustaining liquid water on its surface.  This amounts to 300m (that's 300 million) potentially habitable worlds.  Not to worry if this seems hard to picture since the introduction of micro-LEDS will likely give you a much better view of it all as bendable and even transparent television screens of 110 and 146 inches get closer to entering the consumer market (keep in mind that these micro-LEDS differ from the OLED and QLED screens now out; and to make things more confusing, neither are micro-LEDs the same as mini-LED screens...what??)  Sit in a chair and bend the screen around you...and prepare to take it all in.

    It's a bit too much information, the world advancing at such a clip that escape seems welcome, which is where the fantasy world enters.  Put another way, author Katherine May writes of backing off from her alcohol usage, saying: I'm uncomfortably aware of the number of times I reached for it in the last few years as a way of snuffing out the relentless days that left me feeling battered. Anxiety lurked in my body like groundwater, and every now and then it would rain and the level would rise up in my throat, surging into my sinuses, banking up behind my eyes.  The best part of a bottle of wine --or better still, three large dirty martinis-- would quell it for a while.  I felt like pouring a drink would put a full stop on my day; after that point, I was voluntarily incapable.  I couldn't be expected to make any more sensible decisions or to reply to emails with the necessary delicacy.  I was scuppering myself.

     Alas, all is far from lost.  What I've discovered in jumping off into something new is that it's probably important to separate the two, to let yourself be carried away but perhaps also be tethered a bit to reality.  The movie About Time pokes fun at the possibility of time travel minus the science fictional aspect (it's from the writers of Notting Hill, if that helps at all); but it reflected a similar premise about lives not lived as noted in a review in The New Yorker: Historic events generate unlived lives.  Years from now, we may wonder where we would be if the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t shifted us onto new courses.  Sometimes we can see another life opening out to one side, like a freeway exit...He cites the critic William Empson: “There is more in the child than any man has been able to keep.”  We have unlived lives for all sorts of reasons: because we make choices; because society constrains us; because events force our hand; most of all, because we are singular individuals, becoming more so with time.  “While growth realizes, it narrows,” Miller writes.  “Plural possibilities simmer down.”  This is painful, but it’s an odd kind of pain—hypothetical, paradoxical.  Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are.  We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened.  Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.

     We may not need the alcohol or the drugs or the Martian landers to escape this world; a book or movie, a song or even a comic novel might be fine.  Escaping might be as easy as shedding an old self and exploring a new.  As author May writes about the Gaelic myth of Cailleach, two goddesses continually switch places and bring the seasons, but in some versions the two are but one, "two faces of the same goddess: youth and vitality for summer, age and wisdom for winter."  She adds: We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way.  Instead we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty.  This is a brutal untruth.  Life meanders like a path through the woods.  We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones.  Given time, they grow again.  Perhaps we should welcome the fantasy, the imagination, the new worlds both deep in space and deep within ourselves.  We may find that embracing fantasy may indeed prove fantastic.

*Lest you discount the work of such illustrators and authors, it should be noted that Jean Moebius Gerard worked with the directors of Alien (Ridley Scott), The Fifth Element (Luc Besson), Time Masters (René Laloux), Tron (Steven Lisberger), and The Abyss (James Cameron), not to mention Stan Lee.  Moebius passed away at the age of 73 in his home some nine years ago...